Paytm, the digital payments giant is ready to bring its service to the next level with investment plans of over $745.16 Mn (INR 5,000 crore) in its central business.
In an interview with ET, Founder and CEO of Paytm, Vijay Shekhar Sharma announced that the company is targeting to double the amount of transactions it records every quarter to 2 billion by the end of 2018.
To achieve this target, Paytm will invest $745.16 Mn in payments and predominantly in the financial services. The focus on financial services is because “customer lifecycle is getting to the next level of maturity.”
“It’s a logical extension as we worked on commerce last year like travel and ticketing, where we are just a few notches below market leaders. Our obligation will always remain to increase the market size in any category that we go to and not take away market share, as we have shown in payments,”
said Paytm CEO, Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
Additionally, he shared that the creation of new types of loans, newer types of insurance and innovative ways of wealth management will take time to be implemented because getting through the licenses and regulations is a time consuming task.
The CEO also shared that the RBI’s Know-Your-Customer (KYC) requirements majorly affected the platform’s wallet-to-wallet P2P transactions in March but operations resumed smoothly in April thanks to the UPI implementation.
“One of the lucky things for us is that we started our KYC operations one year ago. We were building our model with financial services in mint much before the KYC obligation came on. It becomes onerous on an entity which is just in the payments business. Now the wallets are being issued by Paytm Payments Bank,” Vijay Shekhar Sharma added.
Paytm has been India’s leading and largest digital payments platform and has been working tirelessly in expanding its product portfolio to retain users and keep its market share. Most recently, they launched the Paytm Tap Card last week to enable offline payments as well.
Additionally, they updated the Paytm app to personalize the app experience according to users. Since the update, money transfers are now simpler and faster to carry out, offering convenient transfer of money from any user’s Paytm Payments Bank account or Paytm Wallet or any other bank account to another bank account for free.
The digital payments platform is the leading fintech company in India achieving a run rate of 1 Billion transactions every three months and recording a gross transaction value that quadrupled from $5 Bn in March 2017 to $20 Bn in March 2018.